WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Galatea, FAI - Catania: ethnic cleansing and gentrification - Part Two (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Gentrification and racial capitalism ---- When we talk about
gentrification, in a nutshell, we mean a migration of a rich
socioeconomic group (possibly composed of young, white, freelancers and
with high levels of education and income) to a poorer area , populated
by people with low income and/or belonging to sexual minorities and
non-white and non-European ethnic groups. This shift involves an
acquisition, by the richest group, of the properties at rock-bottom
prices (therefore previously devalued); the subsequent recovery and
transformation in a commercial sense (accommodation and/or
restaurant/pub, retail sales activities (clothing shops, music shops,
mini-markets) etc.) of these infrastructures will increase the prices of
the nearby buildings and will cause a removal of the "old" residents.

In the studies carried out by the American Peter Marcuse, university
professor of urban planning, he highlighted four types of removals in
"Gentrification, abandonment, and displacement: connections, causes, and
policy responses in New York City"1:

- direct: aimed at the single individual or family unit. It can happen
on a physical level (example: when property owners use the public force)
or economically (example: an increase in rent);

- direct chain: when families occupy dilapidated buildings and are
subsequently removed;

- by exclusion: refers to those residents who cannot access housing
because it has been abandoned and/or gentrified: "When a family
voluntarily leaves a home and it is abandoned or gentrified, it will be
impossible for a second family unit move as the number of available
homes in the housing market has been reduced. The second family,
therefore, is excluded from the home where they would otherwise have
lived"2;

- by pressure: refers to the expropriation suffered by families during
the transformation of the neighborhoods in which they live: "When a
family sees the neighborhood in which they live change drastically, when
their friends leave the neighborhood, when the shops they frequent are
liquidated - and in their place other commercial establishments aimed at
other customers arise -, and when changes in public structures,
transport models and support services are making the area less and less
liveable, the removal[...]will only be a question of time."3

In the phases of displacement and, more generally, gentrification, the
institutions play their cards in the form of an increase in the value of
land and a long-term reduction (quantitative and qualitative) of public
services and infrastructures (especially healthcare). This question
should not be surprising: state institutions are the main political
components of domination in a delimited territory and maintain and
guarantee a series of social and economic relationships between
individuals, groups and classes. The violence perpetrated by these
entities - or, better to say by the State - is based on models of
pacification, militarization and control applied such as: community
surveillance, racial profiling and preventive arrest and capture
policies and containment.

Acts that serve to "clean up" streets and neighborhoods and protect
investments in areas undergoing redevelopment.

Gentrification, therefore, "is not only the reinvestment of capital in
urban spaces but also the accompaniment of security forces in exercising
violence and spatial control on poor and racialized urban populations." 4

In the capitalist context and of institutional violence, this process of
rejuvenation of neighborhoods or urban spaces considered degraded is
based on "racial capitalism" 5 where products, places and people are
evaluated based on their racialization (i.e. a hierarchical and violent
based on biological racial differences), urban residence, class and
degree of "diversity".6

Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana sets out in one of her articles 7 four points on
how gentrification and racial capitalism are inseparable:

- disinvestment in those neighborhoods that do not receive an inflow of
capital and suffer a loss of population. From this situation two
consequential conditions are created: the first is "redlining" 8 and the
second is future investment by private individuals (assisted by
institutional bodies) in impoverished, marginalized and racialized contexts;

- lack of homogeneity and inequality as consequences of disinvestment.
The initial processes of gentrification occur in a "patchy" (or uneven)
manner, highlighting an economic and racial disparity that influences
"the way investors, bankers, municipal officials, appraisers and
potential home buyers and renters see , through the different forms of
value, those neighborhoods to be gentrified."

- the revaluation of those neighborhoods that go "from less likely to
suffer from gentrification to being highly valued places - due to their
proximity to the city center or the commodification of the "diversity"
of non-white people."

- the process of (re)development of neighborhoods by both "external" and
"internal" economic actors.

Ultimately, both capitalist and institutional racism in a gentrifying
context violently excludes any human being who is non-productive or
harmful to the economic-real estate progress formed by the provision of
tourism services and investments resulting from previous devaluations.
What we have reported (and summarized) is what could happen in the not
too distant future in San Berillo.

Conclusion

The gentrification process is not just a mere discussion of prices,
class or social-economic status: it is also racist, sexual 9 and
species-specific. In the context examined by us, San Berillo, we are
witnessing signs of gentrification outlined by what has happened - and
is still happening - in the various central areas of the Etna city
(Murorotto or Pozzo di Gammazita and Terme dell'Indirizzo, Pescheria,
streets Gemellaro and Santa Filomena, the streets between Piazza
Università and Piazza Teatro and, soon, Civita).

Unlike these, however, San Berillo is literally a symbol of
institutional and capitalist violence - which has shaped and destroyed
an entire community only to satisfy certain economic and political
appetites. Although semi-emptyed by the continuous raids of the police
forces and mocked and/or presented as a human zoo by white people and
associations, the neighborhood is still alive and is a home for all
those people considered "scum" or "non-human" by society today.

To escape from dominant logics of this nature and counteract these
beginnings of gentrification, it is advisable that work be carried out
both on serious and detailed counter-information (and not slogan
communiqués) and on mutual help towards the residents (care and support
work emotional, psychological and economic) and defense of a physical
place (intended as home and not street)).

This discussion, obviously, does not only apply to San Berillo or the
center of Catania: it applies to all those urban areas undergoing or
close to gentrification.

Those who want a free and fair society, the fight against the consumer
society, the alienation of the individual and the abuse of territories
must be carried forward without ifs or buts.

Note

1Published in "Urban Law Annual. Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law",
Volume 28, 1985, pp. 195-240. Links

2Ibid

3Ibidem, p. 207

4Maharawal, M. M. (2017), "Black Lives Matter, gentrification and the
security state in the San Francisco Bay Area", Anthropological Theory,
Volume 17, no. 3, page 349. Link

5Term coined by Cedric Robinson, an American university professor, in
the book "Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition".
Robinson explained that capitalism emerged within the feudal order and
flourished in the cultural terrain of a Western civilization steeped in
racist themes and dependent on slavery, violence and genocide. "The
bourgeoisie that guided the development of capitalism," writes Robinson
in the book cited above, "came from particular ethnic and cultural
groups; the European proletarians and mercenaries of the leading states
from others; its farmers from yet other cultures; and his slaves from
completely different worlds. The predisposition of European
civilization, through capitalism, was to differentiate and not to
homogenize - therefore to exasperate regional, subcultural and dialectal
differences into "racial" differences. As the Slavs became the natural
slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation
during the Early Middle Ages, as the Tatars came to occupy a similar
position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so, to the
systemic interlocking of capitalism in the 16th century, the peoples of
the Third World began to fill this expanding[slavery]category with a
civilization reproduced by capitalism." (p. 26) Recognizing these
passages helps us understand how the two things (capitalism and racism)
are not separate or born in different historical periods but, indeed,
have a common root and have evolved together up to the present day.

6By diversity we refer to that type of operations carried out by white
pro-gentrification people who exalt exoticism and cultural difference
and, at the same time, commodify and empty the symbols of non-white and
non-European communities (in particular African, Asian and Native
Americans) from their anti-colonial and anti-oppressive meanings.

7 Rucks-Ahidiana, Z. (2022), "Theorizing gentrification as a process of
racial capitalism," City & Community, Volume 21, no. 3, pages. 179-180.
Links

8 Discriminatory practice in which services are denied to those
potential clients who reside in neighborhoods classified as "dangerous"
for economic investment (inhabited by a significant number of low-income
racial and ethnic minorities)

9 In the case of San Berillo we are referring to sex workers and their
being represented in a criminalizing way and of "diversity" or value of
the neighborhood. In order not to make this article heavier, we will
write another where we will deal with this issue.

Galatea Anarchist Group


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